The Mobile Studio Project in Physics

The Mobile Card

As the Mobile Card continues its development, student-centered laboratory activities are designed in which the Mobile Card is used to replace or supplement traditional equipment. Because the Card contains, for instance, a function generator and oscilloscope, these two pieces of traditional and expensive laboratory equipment can be replaced by a single inexpensive Mobile Card running in conjunction with a student’s own laptop computer.

Another example of the advantage of Mobile Card will be its ability to provide data on acceleration, velocity and position through an accellometer on a removable “daughter card” which communicates wirelessly to the Mobile Card. This configuration will replace a unwieldy tangle of wires used to service the current data collection apparatus in the study of Newtonian Physics.

While we await final development of the accelerometer, the Card has been used with its other features. The following are a sample of laboratory activities developed by Professors Peter Persans and Scott Dwyer for our second semester introductory physics course using the oscilloscope feature of Mobile Card. When additional activities are introduced they will be included.